


The Rockets Came To Life

by FeathersMcStrange



Series: Doppelgänger (Warehouse 13/The Following) [2]
Category: The Following, Warehouse 13
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Alternate Universe - Twins, Best Friends, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Ensemble Cast, Fireworks, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Misunderstandings, Phone Calls & Telephones, Present Tense
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-26
Updated: 2014-09-26
Packaged: 2018-02-18 21:47:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,781
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2363276
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FeathersMcStrange/pseuds/FeathersMcStrange
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Claudia has always loved the fourth of july. Not out of any sense of patriotism, but rather because of the tradition Joshua held with her when she was little. Because of the fireworks. Now Joshua is somewhere far away, and it's the beginning of July, and there's nothing she wants more than to see the fireworks again. If only everybody else were on the same page.</p>
<p>(In which Mike Weston and Steve Jinks are identical twins, Steve is newly back from the dead, there is thought about voices and the nature of being identical, phonecalls are intimidating, and Claudia still has some issues to work through over losing her best friend. Coming back from the dead doesn't erase the 'was dead' part.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Rockets Came To Life

**Author's Note:**

> literally why did this fic even happen we may never know
> 
> just as a note: pete might accidentally be a douche sometimes but he means well and he fixes his mistakes. i actually really like him.

It was what Claudia called the Wednesday of the year, the week spanning the dusk of June and the sweltering dawn of July. She had always loved this time of year. Summer meant heat and cloudless blue skies that stretched on forever, the sun a shining ball of fire. Her hair got lighter and freckles dusted across her face, a sense of peace descending over her and the state of South Dakota alike.

The sunsets were second only to the sunrises, water-colour hues of pink and blue splashed across ravines and cliff edges. When the sun finally reached the right level it lit the badlands aflame in a wash of burning orange light. But what she loved most of all, more than the endless days and balmy nights, more than the sunrises and sunsets put together, was the fireworks.

She could care less about independence day itself, but the _fireworks_.

Flower bursts of red and white, falling down in glittering showers through a star studded navy velvet night. Her favorites were the kind that had a low base boom when they set off, vibrating deep in her chest while she watched a rainbow explode above her.

This would be the first year she had spent the fourth of July with anyone who wasn't Joshua. Her first fireworks show with Artie, Pete, Myka, Steve, and probably Leena too, if she could be persuaded into it. Claudia was already beyond excited, envisioning sitting between Pete and Myka, staring up at the sky.

In the days leading up to the fourth, she started to get ready, going out to find sparklers and impulsively buying a large picnic blanket in the same shade of lime green as the streaks in her hair.

Steve was the first to notice something was up.

He sat at the breakfast table on July fourth, watching Claudia practically bounce into the room before anybody else showed up. That struck him as highly unusual, given the entire time he had known Claudia Donovan, she had never once gotten to breakfast before Myka, much less looked conscious before her third cup of coffee.

With an eyebrow quirked up and his mug halfway to his lips, Steve watched silently as Claudia pulled back her chair, plopped down in it, and grinned at him. It was unnerving, to say the least.

“Good morning, sunshine,” he said evenly, trying not to let his shock bleed out into his voice.

“Steve!” Claudia exclaimed, smile getting impossibly wider.

“Have the pod people come to invade Earth?” Steve asked. She looked at him weirdly. “You're. Um. Chipper, this morning. Where's my old friend, before-ten-AM-zombie-Claudia?”

“Just too stoked to sleep, I guess? I dunno, something about July just...” she sighed, a dreamy look on her face. “It just feels right, you know?”

“Not really,” mumbled a sleep laden Pete, walking with lead steps over to the seat across from Claudia, next to Steve.

“Ah, see, there's the comatose hardly alive morning hater I'm used to. Hi Pete. What are _you_ doing up at seven AM?”

Pete groaned dramatically. “Too damn hot to sleep. I _hate_ summer.”

“Blasphemy,” Claudia proclaimed, fingers interlaced behind her head. She turned and looked at the doorway when she heard footsteps on the staircase, heralding the arrival of a pyjama clad Myka, curly black hair a tangle of dark corkscrews about her hazy-expressioned face.

She stood in the doorway for a moment, taking in the sight of not just Steve but also Claudia and Pete, already seated at the table. Myka stared for a second then shook her head, dismissing her confusion as – for the moment at least – irrelevant.

For his part Steve wondered if the season was messing with all of them, given Myka usually looked at least three times more alert than Claudia by the time the younger girl managed to stumble down and find an open chair.

All four of them sat in a comfortable, companionate silence until, roughly ten minutes later, Artie showed up. He blinked, takena back by the full roster already present at the table.

“Is it the Rapture?”

“Get with the program, Artie, it's _July fourth_ ,” Claudia said like a person who was explaining something she thought he should obviously already know.

“Yes, thank you, I own a calendar. Look at you, all bright and shiny.”

“That's what I said. It's not normal,” threw in Steve. There was a brief second where Artie looked at him like they all sometimes looked at him since he'd come back, like he couldn't believe Steve was there, just taking in the image of him sitting at the table, breathing. It was a look that honestly unnerved Steve a little, but at the same time was somewhat comforting.

“Whatever,” Claudia dismissed, breaking the silence. “You all just don't properly appreciate the fourth, okay?”

Artie frowned. “Do you have plans we should be aware of?”

She gave him a weird look. “Duh. We're all going to watch fireworks.”

From the other room she heard Leena try and choke down a burst of laughter. Claudia looked around the room and saw the ring of faces looking at her in a range of confusion and skepticism.

“What?”

Pete gave Steve a look like 'she's your best friend you deal with it'. Giving him a long suffering look in return, Steve turned to face Claudia.

“Um, Claud?” he said hesitantly.

“Yes?” She still had that same bright smile on.

“What's this about us all 'going to watch fireworks'?”

At that, her face fell slightly, smile fading. “Well I just sort of. Assumed.”

“Assumed what?” Pete's question was accompanied by a sharp bark of laughter. “That we were all gonna go traipsing up to some hillside together to stare at fireworks like a bunch of elementary school kids?”

Claudia stood up, grin now completely gone from her face.

“You know what? Forget it.” She abruptly urned away from the table and walked out the door, heavy footsteps following her ascent up the stairs. The last thing they heard from Claudia was the hollow slam of her door as she went into her room and let the thick oak panel swing shut behind her.

Pete tore his gaze away from the place she had just exited when he felt a hard slap on his arm. He turned sharply and was met with Myka's icy glare.

Fleetingly, he wondered how many times over the course of his life at the Warehouse he was going to relive this particular scenario.

“You jerk, now look what you did,” Myka hissed. “Someone's gonna have to go up there and fix this before it turns into a Situation.”

“If I had known it was that important to her, I'd have gone and packed a picnic basket myself.”

Rolling her eyes in a way only Myka could, she got up and made for the stairs.

“Hold up,” Steve called after her, rising from his seat as well and jogging to catch up with her. The hallway was darker than the dining room and it took a moment for his eyes to adjust. “I'll go and talk to her.”

After studying his face for a moment, gauging whether he was gonna behave like a 20-something dude and make things worse or like Claudia's best friend and make it better, Myka nodded.

“Okay. Just don't screw it up.”

As he turned away from her and started up the staircase, Steve heard Myka's muffled irritated voice lecturing Pete before she was hardly in the room. Steve shook his head. Sometimes those two were better than daytime tv.

He knocked quietly on Claudia's door and waiter for her muffled 'what do you want, Steve' before he went in.

“If you're here to mock me and my childish enjoyment of ridiculous holidays, save it. I already feel mortified. If I got any more embarrassed, I might literally die.” Her voice was distorted, but he could tell she was upset.

Shaking his head, Steve gently pulled the pillow off Claudia's face.

“I don't think you have anything to be embarrassed about. Pete put his foot in it, he's the one who should be embarrassed. Not you.”

Claudia made a distressed noise, grabbing the pillow from him and jamming it back over her face. “I have never in my life been more mortified.” She pulled the corner up and peeked at him, a slight smirk on her face. “Except maybe that time I thought you were hitting on me, that was _definitely_ worse.”

With a light laugh, Steve flopped onto the bed beside her, staring at the glow in the dark stars stuck to Claudia ceiling. He had spent three hours with her one afternoon before he died, sticking those stars up from a pattern that Pete had drawn for them. Some set of constellations that Steve had forgotten the names of.

He had no idea how to go about dealing with this, 'this' being the fact that Claudia's reaction to Pete's admittedly poorly thought out response to her excitement was obviously about something more than fireworks.

Fortunately for Steve, the problem was taken out of his hands when – about a minute later – Claudia started talking, pulling the pillow behind her head and doggedly not looking at him as she spoke.

“Joshua took me.” There were a few long seconds between that and when she continued. “When I was younger. He would take me to see, uh, the fireworks. Every year. He would give me sparklers and let me sit on his shoulders to watch the show. Then when he...” Her voice cracked, and Steve shifted so that their shoulders were pressed together, offering silent reassurance. “Anyway, I haven't celebrated the fourth of July since it happened. So I thought maybe this year we could... I don't know. It was a silly idea.”

She still wasn't looking at him, but Steve shook his head anyway.

“It's not.”

Again it took her a stretch of time to start talking.

“And then you... You died and now you're here and I just wanted to do something with all of us together, like a real-” She broke off, but Steve knew how that sentence ended.

“It was a good idea, Claudia.”

“I dunno.” Claudia shrugged, and Steve felt rather than saw it. “Maybe.”

Steve thought back to when he had spent about two hours searching for Claudia after receiving an assignment from Artie. She seemed to have vanished, nowhere to be found in the long, seemingly endless and constantly shifting isles of the warehouse. He found her eventually, standing still with her face upturned, a charcoal grey raincloud hovering above her head. Water pelted down from it, and Steve had briefly thought of what his life had turned into that a rain storm indoors didn't phase him in the slightest.

'Sometimes,' Claudia had said when he asked her why she'd gone fishing for some hypothermia, 'you just need a little bit of rain.'

That hadn't been long after they'd met, and now it felt like a lifetime ago. And, Steve thought rather darkly, it sort of had been, given he had died in the interim.

_Sometimes, you just need a little bit of rain_ , he thought, staring up at a constellation whose name he still couldn't remember. He had his own version of that. Sometimes, Steve decided, you just need a little bit of fun.

Claudia jumped slightly when Steve sat up, starling her. He jumped easily off the bed, bouncing a bit as he grabbed her hands and pulled her to a stand.

“You and I,” he announced, “are going to do something fun. No work for the rest of the day. We're taking a holiday.”

“Artie's not gonna like that,” snorted Claudia, imagining their grouchy superior's face when Steve said they were taking the day off.

“Let me deal with Artie. Why don't you get on your computer and find something for us to do in the badlands at ten o'clock in the morning on a Friday.” He darted out a hand and ruffled her hair, drawing from her an indignant yelp. Steve looked at her for a moment before he left the room, a sense of pride washing over him.

Claudia was smiling.

Twenty minutes later, Claudia and Steve were in Steve's car, watching mile after mile of unremarkable scrub brush and dusty grey dirt zip by. The drive to the nearest town with a movie theater was about two and a half hours long, and from her place in the passenger's seat, Claudia was sitting back and enjoying the ride. An easy, comfortable quiet lay over her and Steve, music streaming softly from the radio. With the sun shining brightly, air from the open window setting her hair aflutter, and Steve alive beside her, it was the perfect day.

Or it would have been, had the disastrous breakfast not happened.

Since they'd left the boarding house – armed with travel mugs and Artie's blessing to enjoy themselves – Claudia had been trying to avoid thinking about what had gotten her so upset. It was dumb and she should just get over it, but every time she thought about fireworks of Joshua or the look on Pete's face when he'd spoken, she felt queasy.

The best course of action seemed simple to be 'don't think about it'. Unfortunately, with Claudia, 'don't think about it' more often than not ended up translating to 'try so hard to avoid thinking about it that it ends up being all you think about.'

She drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly, sinking further into the comfortable leather of the car seat. The air conditioning was on despite the open windows, and Claudia could hear Myka's voice in her head, remarking on how she should turn it off to save energy.

Every now and then she looked at Steve and tried to wrap her mind around his presence in this car, zipping along a deserted South Dakota highway with an easy smile on his warm, living face.

Claudia still saw it sometimes. The day Steve died. Remembered the way that grief had lived inside her, putting down roots in her ribcage, an invasive species that permeated her whole body. Something in her, in all of them, died that day with Steve, and hadn't come back breathing when he did.

She hadn't picked up a phone since she called Mike Weston and told him his twin brother was dead. The screaming on the other end, screaming in a voice that was Steve but Steve was dead so it couldn't be him. The way she'd heard Mike's grief vocalized over several hundred miles, grief that crawled in through her collarbone and made a nest beside hers. After that day, after she spoke to Mike for the first time, she didn't touch a phone again.

When she contacted Mike again, saying 'I don't know how to explain this but I think you need to be here, it's about Steve', she had used email. Every time her phone rang, she stared at it like you would stare at an unmarked brown package sent to you in the mail. The chance that there is a bomb inside is infinitesimally small, but the refusal to touch it for fear it will detonate and obliterate you was there all the same.

Eventually, people just stopped calling.

With thoughts of phone calls and paper package bombs and screaming still running through her mind, Claudia looked at Steve and asked evenly, “Have you spoken to Mike recently?”

Steve's eyes, light and mildly concerned, flicked momentarily from the road to look at her.

“I talk to him almost every day. Skype, mostly. It's weird, he kind of hates talking on the phone now. He never used to before.”

These was an odd feeling in the pit of Claudia's stomach. _I know how he feels_ , she thought but didn't say. Instead she looked outside, through the window and thought about Mike Weston's voice.

“He sounds just like you,” Claudia said, quiet and lost in her own mind. “Mike does.”

“Yeah.” Steve's words had a smile in them. “He does. I think you'd like him. I think if a golden retriever were to turn into a person, it would probably turn into Mike.”

“So nothing like you, then.” She saw the face Steve made at her in the rearview mirror. It looked like Mike, in the pictures Steve had in his desk, of the two of them at their high school graduation.

“Only our faces are identical, Claud.”

_And your voices_ , Claudia thought. Again, she didn't say.

“I should bring him out here for the holidays or something, now that you all know about him. I'm worried about him, actually. He got shot a couple of weeks ago.” Steve never had that problem. He said what he thought.

“You died and came back just like a week before that, getting shot is objectively not that bad.” After she said it, Claudia kind of wished she hadn't. Mike had nearly been killed just about eight days after Steve had what Claudia called his second birthday. She remembered driving him to the airport and hating seeing him go.

Most of all Claudia remembered the sheer panic on Steve's eyes, and how for the next six days she wondered on and off if he had ever really come back at all.

“I died, yeah.” The way Steve said it sounded like a statement that thought it was nonchalant but really ended up sounding uneasy and distant. “And I got better. This case he's working on, that guy's freakin' vendetta... It's gonna kill him. And if it does- Claudia, I died but I _got better_. He won't.”

“It's a hard knock life, Jinksy,” Claudia said, trying to bring Steve's mind out of the dark place she had accidentally led him into.

She was rewarded with a chuckle and a shake of his head.

“Yeah. Yeah, it is.”

Through the silence that descended over the two of them, crossing the last half of an hour to the city, soft strains of music floated past in the cool highway wind. When Claudia next found her voice, the outskirts of their destination had crested the horizon, just barely in their line of sight.

“If he's anything like you, he'll be fine,” she said. She hoped it was comforting. She hoped it was true.

“He will be. He's gotta be.”

Hope, fear, and love were symbiotic in a life where you knew too much about what goes bump in the night to ever really feel safe, if just so the rest of the world was able to sleep soundly. It wasn't fair, but really nothing ever was.

The final miles crossed in an uneventful blur. Nobody said anything more until they reached the theater and spent a good ten minutes deciding what movie to see. Eventually they settled on some action flick composed about sixty percent by car chases and explosions. It was a fun movie. Nobody had to think too hard.

The ride back was largely silent, the late afternoon sun hanging low in the clear sky. Claudia was lost in the haze of a movie still, that time just after you go to the theater when nothing quite feels entirely real. She found herself drifting in and out of sleep, Steve's voice a distant background as he sang softly along with the song playing on the radio.

It was nearly six when they rolled back into the long driveway to the boarding house. Steve gently shook Claudia awake, and of what he said next, the only word she caught was 'home'. She kept her eyes closed for just a moment longer, enjoying how that word sounded.

“Come on,” Steve urged, pulling at her. “If we take too long they'll leave without us.”

Confused and still hazy with sleep, Claudia heaved herself out of the car and followed Steve a short ways away, to Pete's SUV. Myka was leaning agains the hood, keys dangling from her fingers. Peering around the car, Claudia spotted Artie, rummaging around in the trunk. Pete and Leena appeared to still be in the house. Awash with confusion, Claudia looked at Steve.

“What's going on?” she asked. A voice from behind her answered.

“We're all going to watch fireworks with you,” Pete said, lugging an hones to god picnic basket over to the car. When he'd relieved himself of his burden, he walked over to her, an apologetic smile on his ashamed face. “I was an asshole earlier and I shouldn't have been. If it's important to you, it's important to us. Claudia wants fireworks? Bring on the pyrotechnics.”

She smiled back at him, an acceptance of his apology.

With bickering over seats and trying to sort out how exactly to go about cramming six people into Pete's van, it took roughly ten minutes to actual get going. The hillside Artie had picked wasn't too far away, and they were left with a solid hour of daylight by the time they got there.

The sun began to set over the cliffside opposite them, the blanket covered ground they sat on overlooking a deep sandstone quarry. It was close enough to see the show from the nearest town, but not so close that the smog could reach them.

In her spot between Pete and Myka, both of them at least a head taller than her and shielding her from the wind, Claudia looked up at the darkening sky and remembered being small when the world was large and the night time went on forever. More than anything she remembered her brother's strong, warm hands around hers, showing her how to hold the sparkler.

From the distance came a low boom and a cloud of bright white flashes cascaded down past the first appearance of distant sentinel stars. Claudia felt her heart leap into her throat as more and more fireworks went off in the sky. On either side of her, Pete and Myka still block the wind, and a glance to her right showed her Steve. He sat on Pete's other side, face tilted upwards, firecracker flashes reflecting in his awestruck eyes.

Sparkling showers that glitter and dance painted a showcase of bright color across the indigo sky. Claudia thought that if a moment could last forever, she would want it to be this one.

The finale arrived in a shower of multi-tiered, massive explosions. It was better than anything she could ever have imagined. 

_Where was I when the rockets came to life_

_And carried you away into the alligator sky_

_Even though we'll never know what's up ahead_

_I'm never lettin go, never lettin go_

_\- Owl City 'Alligator Sky'_

**Author's Note:**

> Drop me a line if you liked it! I'm gonna do a part soon centered around the 'The Following' half of this crossover/versemoosh.


End file.
